Cracking Open a Coffin

by Gwendoline Butler

  ‘Never believed it for a minute,’ she said lightly.

  I must be careful, Coffin thought, not push. Later on, she’ll hear about the inquiry and think that I wanted our relationship tidied up for that reason. That would be fatal.

  ‘Be worth a try?’

  Stella hesitated. ‘I’m never one to rush into things,’ she said.

  He looked into her eyes and saw that she had heard, and did know, God knew how, but what he couldn’t read there was how she judged him.

  He felt himself go white. The blood seemed to drain away from his heart and deposit itself somewhere else, his feet probably, they felt heavy and his hands hot.

  He heard himself say: ‘There’s something I haven’t been telling you.’

  She nodded. ‘Wasn’t there always?’

  For a moment there was silence. Then the telephone rang in the quiet room.

  With a sigh, Coffin picked it up, he listened, not saying very much. ‘Right, thank you for the message.’

  Stella looked at him. ‘Work?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A big fire in a warehouse on the Arrow Centre in Swinehouse.’ This was the new industrial complex, just completed, but Swinehouse had never been an easy area to police and was getting nastier by the day.

  ‘That’s bad?’

  ‘Bad enough. Looks like arson and three dead bodies inside,’ he said briefly.

  Stella was relieved. ‘Nothing to do with …’

  ‘No, nothing to do with Amy Dean.’ Probably nastier. He did not inform her what had been done to the three corpses before they had died, but it was a case they would solve. Gangland killings usually came with name tags. Nor did he tell her that it was not on account of the three dead men he had been informed, he wouldn’t have been bothered for that, the usual morning brief would do, but because there was gang violence in the streets around the Arrow Centre and one policeman had already been hurt.

  Before he could come back to her, the phone rang again. Coffin hesitated.

  ‘Answer it,’ Stella said.

  He moved to the end of the room with the portable telephone; some instinct told him to get further from Stella. ‘Hello? Mrs Rolt?’

  Stella listened. His part seemed to consist of saying Yes and No.

  ‘What was all that about?’ she said when he had finished.

  ‘I’m not sure. Ostensibly to tell me she had had a phone call from Angela to say she was staying with friends and was all right … But yesterday she claimed to neither know nor care about Angela.’

  ‘I distrust that phrase “all right”,’ said Stella. ‘It nearly always means the opposite.’

  ‘You could be on the ball there.’ He sounded troubled.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Earlier, she claimed to have no interest in Angela. I think what she was really trying to pass were anxieties and fears that she couldn’t find a name for. Or didn’t want to. She’s worried.’

  ‘Who is she most likely to worry about?’

  ‘God knows. You tell me. All the inhabitants of Star Court House, Rosa Maundy, Angela, Josephine, herself.’

  ‘I don’t think she worries about herself. Not from what Josephine has said.’

  ‘All right: Josephine, then. She worries about her. What do you know about Josephine?’

  ‘Anything I know, you are right there with me.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I’ve told you all I know. I have no secrets.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  Stella was silent, studying her hands. ‘I must get a manicure.’

  ‘Stella?’

  ‘All I know is that when Josephine was at her very lowest, drugs, drink, living in obscurity and poverty, there was a tragedy in her life.’

  ‘Is that all you know?’

  Stella nodded.

  ‘Who knows more?’

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d ask that. If you really want to know about Josie, then you had better talk to Maisie Rolt. If Josie has talked to anyone, then it will be Maisie.’

  He considered what she had said, watching her face which could express so much, while covering up so much more. ‘I think you do know more, or you guess or have heard it, but don’t want to say.’

  ‘Why ask, then?’

  ‘Because I must, because it may be part of this murder investigation.’

  ‘Do you know where you are going?’

  Coffin hesitated. ‘In the case, you mean? Or in life?’

  Stella laughed. ‘That says something about your mood. I wasn’t asking a philosophical question. I meant, do you have any idea about the killer?’

  He picked up her hand, studying it carefully. ‘Yes, you do need a manicure … Try a darker colour red, your hands can stand it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She knew he was right, but she withdrew her hand.

  ‘And about your question … I suppose, yes, I do know where I’m going. The answer is: on the way. So now, what about a bit of confidence from you in return? About Josephine.’

  ‘The story is that in that dark time in Josie’s life when she was really at the bottom, there was some violent episode, a death, that Josie was involved in. A girl died.’

  ‘It will be in the records.’ Why hadn’t someone dug this up? A little whip of anger moved inside him … He tried to push it back in case it touched Stella.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. But Josie was probably using her own real name. It would just have been an obscure episode somewhere.’

  She did know a little bit more, but it didn’t seem fair to Josephine to tell. And after all, he was a policeman: he would find out.

  The telephone call and the conversation did not break their mood, a half-smile passed between them.

  Coffin felt at ease: we really have turned a corner. He took her hand and pulled her up from the chair. ‘Come on. I want you.’

  In the night, the moon shone on his face and woke him. Stella was lying across one corner of the bed, pink and flushed in sleep. She looked young. Where the moonlight touched her hair, it looked so soft and pretty.

  He drew the blanket over her and tucked it round her. Gently. He felt gentle. Other feelings might burn inside him, but for Stella it must be gentleness.

  He went to the window and looked out. To the west was the area of the university, the centre of so much of the investigation about Amy Dean. I must speak to those two students, he told himself, remembering the call from the librarian, or see that someone does. Like to do it myself.

  South of it lay the hospital: the Blackhall boy had left the hospital but the victim of the robbery still lay there. Her recovery looked good, though. You could take a breath of relief there.

  A car ride away from the hospital was Star Court House.

  Beyond his horizon was the Essex woodland where Amy Dean’s body had been found.

  A procession of characters marched across his mind. Sir Thomas and his wife, James Dean, Rosa Maundy, Josephine, the strange girl, Angela. The flying Valkyries.

  And there was the burning city at the end of The Ring. But this city, his Second City, must not burn, if he could prevent it. Yet he knew how thin was the dividing line between peace and violence. Not since Queen Victoria had feared the Chartist mobs had there been such a real chance of civil disorder on a grand scale. He knew that somewhere in that city, as well as the fire of which he knew, there would have been several robberies, a clutch of car thefts, domestic violence, marital rape, and the usual variety of beatings and stabbings without which a night in the Second City could not pass. Even Christmas night was celebrated so. Only on the night of the Great Wind, when the hurricane had swept across a London more used to subtler bad weather, had there been little crime and virtually no violence. He couldn’t answer for the other City of London, but that was how it had been in his Second City. The world out there was violent and virtuous, sad and sweet at the same time. Full of oddities like Our General, who might be a very good person, a saint of the pavements, or a very evil person, only time would
tell how she would turn out. What she did or what her life forced her to do would shape her. She wasn’t the only one. Thousands like her.

  He got himself a drink and sat by the window. Tiddles leapt on his lap and demanded to be stroked. Coffin obliged, tracing the spine down Tiddles’s back with a gentle finger. Tiddles looked up trustfully, eyes shining in the half light. Good old Tiddles, easily made happy, he thought. At that moment, he did not regard himself highly. The innocence of his youth had turned into something a little more shabby.

  As a lad, he had never been sure if sex was something shining and splendid, or sordid and hasty, or a bit of a joke. It wasn’t one that he had been able to laugh at very often, which was a shame, because he might have been the better for it. He ran his mind over it all: relationships before his marriage, then his marriage and his wife’s death, their child’s death (pain and guilt there for him to bear for ever), some brief relationships afterwards, and through it all, Stella. The only, truly important love. With her there was happiness. He might be content in making her content.

  Then he laughed. Anyone less peaceful and content than his vibrant Stella who would never give up a battle was not to be imagined.

  He finished his drink, then went down the winding staircase to let out Tiddles whose day began early, before dawn, ready for those early rising mice and other eatable wanderers.

  There was a piece of paper pushed under his front door. It was folded over to make a kind of envelope and addressed to him.

  Handwritten with a pale blue ballpoint on cheap but unlined paper. Probably not letter paper at all, but torn off a block of rough jotting paper. He made all these observations automatically. It said:

  You let Josie down. We’ll get you for that.

  Short and sweet. Unsigned.

  It smelt of smoke. He lifted it to his nose. Yes, smoke. Not cigarette smoke or pipe smoke, the smell of which you can pick up easily if you have the nose for it, but the scent of burning wood. Other stuff too, maybe, but fire somewhere there.

  He closed the door carefully behind Tiddles. He found he was trembling with anger.

  This was happening far too often: this angry reaction to stress or any threat. He forced himself to walk up the stairs slowly. He placed himself carefully in his chair; he must separate himself from Stella until he was calmer.

  He closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. I won’t let myself think of what might be my violence. Let it go.

  Yet the subject would not lie down. As they parted in the morning, Coffin said: ‘Stella … if I ever hit you, really hurt you, violently, what would you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d like to think that I would walk away and never see you again. However much you said you were sorry and it would never happen again. But I might not.’

  ‘Yes, I would say I was sorry.’

  ‘I might not be brave enough to go. It does require courage to admit someone you have loved is terrible.’ She saw Coffin flinch. ‘I would probably find it easier to blame myself. To think that somehow or the other it was my fault. Accept the guilt.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘Does it matter to you so much?’

  ‘Yes, it does. It matters.’

  Stella collected her belongings. ‘I have to go: I have an important interview and the manicurist first.’

  They did not kiss, but he saw her down the staircase to the door. She went out and Tiddles came in.

  Up the staircase, the telephone started to ring.

  His day had begun.

  CHAPTER 14

  Coffin’s day continues

  The news about Josephine was arrowed at Coffin from all quarters. It certainly felt like a weapon with a sharp point on it. He was pierced. Maisie Rolt was the first, hers was the telephone call which had started his day. Then Stella, alerted by Maisie, rang him from the Tube station on her way to London.

  And then an item about Josephine appeared on the usual index of overnight crimes and major incidents that was always waiting for his attention when he got to his office. Fiona had it planted on his desk. As an unimportant incident. To her mind, the big dockland fire was the main item. Josephine earned just a few lines: her name, the nature of her death, and her address.

  But come to think of it, his first intimation had been contained in the anonymous note pushed through his door.

  Because he had failed to make contact with Josephine as she had asked, because he felt that he had indeed let her down in life, Coffin knew he had to interest himself in her death.

  Not much information there, he thought, as he studied the few bleak sentences on his schedule of the night’s events. Josephine jostled for attention with the major fire and a botched raid on a local bank and the attempted kidnapping of the bank’s manager and his family.

  Stella had had more to tell.

  ‘Maisie says Josephine has killed herself,’ she had announced over the telephone, her voice almost drowned by the sound of voices and the roar of the double escalators at the Spinnergate Tube station.

  ‘She didn’t tell me that, she was crying, I think.’

  ‘I expect she blamed herself.’

  I blame myself, thought Coffin. I ought to have done more, pushed myself that inch further on. Josephine needed an audience and it ought to have been me. ‘Any idea of why she did it?’ he asked Stella.

  ‘No, she had no idea. I suppose Jo may have had worries we knew nothing about … illness, money. Just depression. She had been depressed. Can you find out?’

  ‘Do what I can.’ If there was a rational motive. People like Josephine, with her life, sometimes just killed themselves, as if they were unable to bear the weight of their history any longer. And he didn’t blame them. You could drag only so much of your past around with you before you wanted to cut yourself away.

  Just once or twice, he had felt like that himself. He surprised himself by admitting it.

  And no, Maisie Rolt did not blame herself. She blamed him, and that was why she telephoned. So he could feel the blame. She might not know herself that was why she’d done it, but: ‘The toad beneath the harrow knows …’ He was the toad.

  They didn’t like men down at Star Court House.

  As Fiona adjusted the papers in front of him with that assertive way of hers (it was Fiona’s spell of duty) he knew what she thought the important news of the day: the attempted kidnapping. It was the sort of news she enjoyed. She would never comment, she was too professional, but he could see it in her eyes. Fiona’s face was more revealing than she knew, it was Lysette who had the real poker face. The death of a woman in a council flat was not important.

  Josephine was not important.

  ‘It hasn’t anything to do with the death of the girl, has it?’ Stella had asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘It may have worried her.’

  ‘You can’t tell,’ he said in a neutral voice. ‘She may have left a letter.’

  But he judged that Josephine’s death was one of those sad coincidences, of no significance to any larger scheme of things.

  ‘Look, I must go. Find out what you can, will you?’

  ‘I will.’

  Stella was still there, he could hear the voices of other commuters, a child calling out, the sound of feet passing. ‘Don’t let it get to you. Not your fault … I can tell from your voice how you feel. You have a very expressive voice. Know that?’

  Violence, one way and another, could come between them. Casual violence, professional violence, suicidal violence. ‘Don’t worry, Stella.’

  She needed reassuring too. ‘Last night was good, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. You know it. Bless you, Stella.’ He wondered what it would be like to have an orthodox, straightforward married life. If there was such a thing. But he wasn’t that sort of man, and neither was Stella that sort of woman. They had both tried it with other partners and it hadn’t worked. Their lives had changed and shaped them out of true. Anyway, he could not ask her now
with this inquiry hanging over him, which she would get to hear of and conclude that was why he had asked her to marry him.

  Perhaps it would have been.

  He had to clear his own soul first. He had never used that word of himself before. To have it come up now was interesting. Policemen did have souls to save, but they were hard to uncover.

  ‘I love you, Stella,’ he said. But she had gone, the line was dead, and his words floated out to the empty air.

  Fiona was standing waiting for orders and his personal assistant, a plain clothes inspector, Andrew Fletcher, seconded to his office from his normal duties, was at work at a table across the room. The position was a new one, Andrew Fletcher had only been on the job a few months, they were just getting to know each other, but Coffin had observed that between Andrew and Fiona there was a steady quiet rivalry and jockeying for position. It was not going to make his life any easier.

  He handed Fiona a tape of notes and replies to letters to type. ‘Here you are. Not too much there, but let me have them back by lunch-time. Oh, and ring up Mr Chambers’s office and settle an appointment for me to meet him. You have my diary?’ And if my meeting with the Chairman of the Police Committee goes badly, then you might not have to worry about me for much longer.

  He saw Andrew give him a quick look. So he knew too, and was probably wondering where it left him. Doesn’t do to get touched by a falling star. Failure rubs off.

  I’ll give you something else to think about, my lad, Coffin thought. He studied the Information List which sometimes seemed to him to have a resemblance to the Court Circular. ‘Have you got anything new on the suspected suicide and arson in George Eliot House?’

  ‘Nothing you won’t have, sir.’

  ‘Who’s handling it?’

  Andrew Fletcher drew a supplementary paper from a file. ‘It’s in Spinnergate North Division. The CID Inspector there is Charley Bates, but he’s away sick at the moment so it will be his deputy, Amesbury. Ted Amesbury.’

  Yes, he knew the man. Or anyway, remembered his face. Plumpish, with merry blue eyes.